What they can tell of Future and of Past:
They would declare, had they the gift of speech,
The deeds that Time hath wrought from first to last.
* * * * *
My friends, and is there aught beneath the sky
Can with th’ Egyptian Pyramids compare?
In fear of them strong Time hath passèd by;
And everything dreads Time in earth and air.
[291]. A rhyming Romance by Henry of Waldeck (flor. A.D. 1160) with a Latin poem on the same subject by Odo and a prose version still popular in Germany. (Lane’s Nights iii. 81; and Weber’s “Northern Romances.”)
[292]. e.g. ’Ajáib al-Hind (= Marvels of Ind) ninth century, translated by J. Marcel Devic, Paris, 1878; and about the same date the Two Mohammedan Travellers, translated by Renaudot. In the eleventh century we have the famous Sayyid al-Idrisi; in the thirteenth the ’Ajáib al-Makhlúkát of Al-Kazwíni and in the fourteenth the Kharídat al-Ajáib of Ibn Al-Wardi. Lane (in loco) traces most of Sindbad to the two latter sources.